"Ten years of fashion blogging equals tons of designer samples," this one begins, "most of them completely unwearable. I bit the bullet and began gutting my closet." The girl who started a blog to celebrate the accumulation of beautiful things ended the decade dragging garbage bags of them to a donation center, wanting nothing so much as a grey sweater that worked.
I had the math in me for years. "PPW, or price-per-wear, is often how I justify things," I wrote in 2009. Price-per-wear is just sustainability with a calculator: the more times you wear a thing, the cheaper and the better it becomes, which is the entire argument against fast fashion stated as personal accounting.
What I believed as a tired private fact, the law is now trying to make a public rule. France's anti-fast-fashion bill, the Loi Violland, would put an escalating environmental penalty on the cheapest, most disposable items, and the EU's ecodesign regulation pushes the whole market toward fewer, longer-lived, repairable things. Buy less and keep it longer is moving from a budgeting trick to a policy.
That is when you know a value is real. When it moves off the page and into your own apartment, in garbage bags.